I'm happy! first books: thoughts with pictures

I just received the first two books I sent to Blurb.

Overall I’m happy with the results. I have a few things to offer in way of a critique.

First if you’d like to see some images of the books themselves you may look here,
http://jonathanhaledesign.com/blurb/index.html
I did no color correction or sharpening of these images, some of them needed to be lightened due to dark exposure.

First I found the packing to be well done. The box would have to get crushed for anything to happen to the books.

Covers:
On the hard cover copy the dust jacket was folded a bit off.
on the soft cover it was printed a bit off register so that some of the white on the spine wraps around over onto the front cover.
Both covers printed well as far as color and exposure.

Printing:
the paper has a luxurious feel to it. who ever picked out the paper did an excellent job. I love the matte silkiness it imparts, it’s the perfect choice for an art book, or anything else for that matter.

I used no ICC profiles on purpose for the first printing. I wanted to see how the printer handled my files with no help from me. Some of them came from lightroom, and some of them came from photoshop. I had a mix of color, and black and whites I had toned in photoshop using the color sliders. I was really happy with the overall color. Especially in the toned black and white shots.
Some of the shots did print a bit darker than my files, about 15-20% I’d say. fortunately they did not print dark enough to ruin any of the shots. I now have a good idea of how to prepare my images for future printings.

Text:
I was very happy with the text in the books. it was all very crisp and printed perfectly.

Layout:
Some of the layouts worked great, and some not so well. A few of the full bleeds would have been better off printed with borders. Some of the image gets lost in the binding of the book, and this makes two full bleed pages next to each other look pretty bad. Unless there is a lot of negative space around the subjects I would limit myself to one full bleed per spread from now on. How a double spread would print I’d be concerned with. I think you’d loose to much of the image in the middle for it to look proper.

Overall I’m real happy with the printing Blurb has achieved. I’ll be producing some more books and will begin promoting the two books I’ve created already.

thanks Blurb,

- jonathan hale

Hi Jonathan,

 Congratulations on your book project and the book in itself.

thanks guys =)

I plan on making a book about my two cats, I’m sure it will be a best seller :-P